Up to half of a given card set is dropped through game play, while the other half must be earned through collection. Once gamers have collected a set of cards, they can craft them into a badge. These badges are tied to an account and are shown off in a player's profile.

When a player is crafting a badge, they will receive random rewards for game-related items. These rewards are tradable and include downloadable content or game coupons, emoticons, and profile backgrounds.

Gamers can also level up their badges by collecting the set again and earning additional items. All badges now have XP, which in turn contributes to a player's Steam level. When a player levels up, they can receive non-tradable items like profile showcases and extra friends list slots.

Right now, Steam Trading Cards drops are tied to playtime within a game, independent of achievements players may receive. Valve said it is "definitely" looking into adding more rules concerning how cards are drops.

"Many games have achievements that are grindy or un-fun to get, and we want the act of getting game cards to be fun for all users in games," Valve said. "We also don't want to push users to cheat or use achievement-unlockers in games in order to get cards, since that devalues achievements and isn't that fun either."

Portal 2 and Half-Life 2, 2 games with a 2 in title that I'm interested in. I don't know if I can gain anything from this, though. I'm not interested in earning badges by doing different errands, I just want to get some good games at good prices and have a good time playing them. Really simple.

I can't seem to grasp why lots of people don't like this. I personally think this sounds kind of cool. I think this comes from my prospective of a person with little money to spend on wants. I barely ever buy video games. I normally only buy them after Christmas or my birthday when I get money, so making a way in which I can save while playing sounds brilliant. This is on top of the steam sales that they have.

Like there's really anything worth complaining about here....then again it's not like any moronic complainer actually follows through with showing just how much they supposedly hate any business practice ever conceived and actually stops their endless consumption of product, now do they?

this is somewhat worrying now they can take standard features and lock them with stupid cards and badges there was a mention of "granting friends slots"the fuck? will they limit how many friends i can have now?

I can understand why some people may be a bit frustrated at this and would prefer that resources went towards other improvements, but I think it's pretty cool. It would be kind of lame if it were only for little badges or something, but you're able to get DLC and coupons. And you can trade them! How can you complain about potential free or discounted stuff?

Sounds interesting... but will we be able to give copies of these "trading" cards to our friends or to one of my other Steam accounts? (of which I have 3) Also, I hope this will allow me to unlock new guns and/or character skins in CS:GO.

@toshineon@ziproy@JFERNANDEZ84 No its not illegal but you are not BUYING the games on steam. You are buying the right to play them. Thats how they can have all of their awesome sales. It would be ridiculous to be able to "re-sell" the games on their